“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

After Saturday both of you became frightened again, and your joint beliefs and habits of pessimism to some extent at least meant that you began to doubt the gains that had been made. This morning’s pendulum session, while helpful, for the general reasons given earlier, was also however more of an exercise in what is wrong, again, and was not followed by any constructive suggestion at all.

One additional point: Ruburt can indeed recover. Not only that, but his recovery can be fairly easy, but your joint habits of pessimism color your attitudes. It is as if the team coach shouted “Try as hard as you can—but we will probably lose because that is the way it is.”

Now: you have begun to change that attitude. Simply keep in mind those significances. Notice how you are focusing. The bodybuilder does not think he is inhibiting his expression if he chooses to focus on his bodybuilding to the exclusion of distractions that may be quite real but detrimental to his purpose. Feelings of pessimism regarding Ruburt’s condition are detrimental. You both did very well on many occasions recently, so try to duplicate versions of the behavior I told you was helpful—and focus in those directions.

It seems under those conditions that only pessimism can be an adequate response, so that any private or global condition of an adverse nature, left alone, will further deteriorate. [...]

Your upbringings have made you think that pessimism is a more practical response—and it is indeed, if trouble is what you are after.

[...] You may believe that pessimism is more realistic than optimism. [...]

[...] They are highly pertinent, and they are more realistically a part of your biological behavior than your patterns of pessimism are. [...]

[...] When you read the news or hear it, however, because of cultural beliefs you are programmed to behave in a certain fashion, in a fashion that validates, seemingly, the concepts of Freud and Darwin, and the most unfortunate aspects of Christian pessimism.

[...] On the other hand, many who speak most glowingly, in the most idealistic fashions, underneath are filled with the darkest aspects of pessimism and despair. [...]

[...] The feelings of pessimism belong to you both, and help in keeping the symptoms in a stirred-up condition. [...]

[...] The early philosophical poetry represented a philosophy of pessimism. [...]

[...] It can be seen that I was having a hard time to keep from falling into the deep pessimism I’d experienced not long ago, and seemingly had rebounded from. [...]

On your part this did indeed represent an important level of achievement, simply because you have been in the past more easily given to pessimism.

[...] We played a sort of game: I liked her, but I wasn’t going to be besieged by a barrage of negative thoughts and pessimism for an hour, no matter how wittily presented—and she knew it. [...]